We all have big dreams. Mine is to help millions of entrepreneurs succeed together using FairSoftware, our website.

To get there, web 2.0 experts will tell you that your traffic will increase over time as you keep working hard. It’s true, but this also suggests that the road to the top is through small, incremental steps, grinding your way through continuous improvements.

Wrong. Critical mass matters. I call this the elevator effect. Traffic can snowball.

Two weeks ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur of Dallas Mavericks fame, put out an “open source funding” request. He would consider funding anyone who would post a business plan publicly on his blog. I’ll leave a discussion on the rationale for such a contest to another time. What matters is that you could smell the potential publicity that Mark’s visibility combined with his initiative could generate.

I was the first one to post a business plan (it was 10pm by then). I posted the slides on slideshare for all to see.

The next morning, I was interviewed by Rachel Metz from AP. The story got on the wire later in the afternoon and we were prominently mentioned. AP stories reach very far: some friends I had not heard from in years called me to tell me they read it.

It doesn’t stop there. Because of the extra exposure, the presentation on slideshare generated a lot of traffic and it made it to the home page a few days later. Which gave it even more exposure, since every visitor to slideshare (20,000+/day) could see it.

That’s the elevator effect. Once you have momentum, it keeps going up and up exponentially. It’s beyond viral.

FairSoftware benefited from the same elevator effect when we were selected as a TechCrunch50 Finalist last year. Instead of suffering through months of slow traffic growth, we signed up thousands of users instantly.

In conclusion, you do need to keep making small steps toward your dream, whatever it is. But keep on the look-out for the elevator. It rarely stops at your floor, but if the door opens, make sure to jump in!